Simon Brew
Beware of surveys you read in newspapers, warns Simon Brew, because the people who gathered the data aren’t always truthful with their findings.
It was Vic Reeves who famously declared that 88.2% of statistics (or something like that) were made up on the spot. It was a point brought home to me when a PR friend of mine, who shall remain nameless, was struggling to promote a particular website.
They figured, given that the site they were promoting had a particular link to people’s, er, ‘bedroom habits’, that they needed a survey to get the message across. I think they’d watched too much Family Fortunes as a kid.
I hate surveys. My inbox is flooded with them on an alarmingly frequent basis. Every time a new survey comes in, the office shredder licks its lips with the anticipation of a salivating queue of Happy Meal munchers waiting for McDonald’s to open. Even with the advent of email, I make it my duty to print the odd one out, just for the satisfaction of destroying the thing in a fit of rage. I use recycled paper, of course.
As an aside, the most brilliant survey that I ever received was from Microsoft, who had done some stunningly fascinating research on the number of us who spill drinks on our keyboards. See? That’s what happens when you have too much money. You spend it on stuff you really shouldn’t. Said survey was, of course, beyond insightful. After reading it, it felt as though life suddenly made sense. Umpteen percent of us have spilt drinks on our keyboards? Well blimey. What was particularly brilliant about it was that Microsoft added an embargo to the story. An embargo. Like the whole world would be rocked if the news leaked early. Personally, I observed the embargo to the letter, and just to be on the safe side, I’m still observing it now.
Anyway, back to my friend. She, genuinely, sat down one afternoon and made up a series of numbers relating to what we all do once we’ve put our bookmarks in our Dan Browns and dimmed the lights. It was a brilliant piece of work, made all the better for the fact that not one letter of it was true. That didn’t stop at least one tabloid newspaper printing these fictional revelations in a font of some substance. But then it had arrived on an email, so it was bound to be true. But we, for some reason, believe stuff that’s passed around in the electronic age. It’s a great irony that we have more tools than ever to check things out, but decreasingly seem to do so.
Let me now take you to my house on New Year’s day. I walked outside my front door, doing a comedy slide along the piece of ice that had formed on my doorstep, and set about scraping my car windscreen with my Maestro card. Then, a voice came echoing from across the road. ‘Simon!’ it said, ‘happy birthday.’ A very kind gesture, although one I felt was better suited to my actual birthday than for bringing in the new year. A week later, I got a phone call. ‘How was your 40th?’ the friendly soul at the other end of the line enquired. ‘You cheeky little sod,’ I spluttered, ‘I’m not 40. Do I look 40?’
Obviously, you don’t want to jump to a conclusion based on my photograph over there. You know those Photoshop guys never make you look good. Add in the collection of emails I’d received, and I was in a party mood even though I hadn’t actually seen my age total move on a year.
The source of this goodwill, which I appreciate makes me sound like a grumpy old sod, but I’m genuinely grateful for it really, was Facebook. I have a thing about putting the likes of my birth date on show for public consumption. It’s not that I feel that the public desperately wants to consume it, it’s just I’ve always been quite restrictive with what I’ll put on a social network site. Thus, I posted my birthday when I signed up as 1 January 1970. And from there, it became fact. Even a blood relative who has known me my entire life sent me a card based on that date. ‘Sorry it’s late,’ it explained.
I thought I was going mad, even though I knew the date I posted on Facebook isn’t really my birthday. The problem is, and I’ve used the most printable example, that we just believe stuff. I do it, too. There’s just a little element that assumes what’s posted has to be true. Granted, you wouldn’t expect someone to lie about their birthday, but I’ve witnessed time after time that Facebook, and much of the other nonsense that the electronic world allows to fly around the globe unhindered, is often taken as gospel. Heck, one worker in our office left their account open week after week, despite our warnings to the contrary, and so – and again, I don’t come out of this story well – we might have posted something along the lines that said individual was looking forward to Sex And The City 2. Within an hour, my Sex And The City-hating colleague had an offer of someone to go and see the bloody film with.
It’s a harsh reality that people aren’t always entirely truthful with the messages, press releases and postings that they send into the world. Between you and me, a bit of me even wonders if Vic Reeves himself might have got his figures a point or two off. At this rate, the web will be awash with more rumours next that Apple has a tablet planned or something. And as you know, that’s something that will never happen…
